Hello Alexa? I’d Like a Lunar Delivery Please. 10,000 Pounds

Elon Musk isn’t the only CEO who has his eyes on reusable, commercial space vehicles. Recently, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos floated a white paper to NASA management that outlines a plan to send as much as 10,000 pounds of cargo, in a lunar lander, to the moon in a single trip. It’s called Blue Origin. The target would be near the Moon’s south pole, the Shackleton Crater, where there are sections of permanent sunlight that may also harbor ice, key to a permanent human base. It all sounds very Robert Heinlein-esque, these billionaires setting out on new commercial missions. Very cool.

Because of the orientation of the Moon’s south pole, there are parts of the Shackleton Crater that remain in sunlight throughout the month. So says Aviation Week & Space Technology. Most any other part of the Moon has roughly two weeks of sunlight and two weeks of darkness each month.

There’s also a great overview in Aviation Week, the March 20-April 2 issue, pp 24-26. Their BE-4 rocket engine was just shipped from Kent, WA to Van Horn, Texas where it will undergo testing this summer.

The difference being that Musk’s SpaceX has actually done something. Orbital rockets, reusable rockets, and so forth. Bezos’s Blue Origin has launched a few sounding rockets and acted like they invented space travel.